Profile

Clare Smith

My work emphasises the importance of making and time-intensive, repetitive handwork. I work mainly with paper and often use thread and stitch or references to textiles and lace-like structures as metaphors for the fragility of the body. Her choice of materials is informed by her mixed Chinese/English cultural heritage.

Recent work comprises contemplative pieces involving repeated marks and makes use of ready-made grids or constructed quasi-grids. Working with process in this way means working from an inner sense of compulsion rather than from the visual.

“My work often explores the seemingly pointless or purposeless, as in the stitched marks on Chinese rice paper made as part of Stitched Time and drawing acts as a curb on the urge to ‘do something’. Repetition and process take away the anxiety of not knowing what to draw. Sometimes I cannot make the kind of mark intended, because of what the support or material I am using will allow me to make, but at the same time the personal cannot help but make its mark.

I am also interested in ideas around authorship, the dynamics of collective making and the notion of multiples as a metaphor for an individual’s relationship to the group.